Is Ethanol Worth the Cost?

See The U.S. is Drunk on Ethanol: Where's the Outrage? at "Carpe Diem."

"From a Scientific American article "Intoxicated on Independence: Is Domestically Produced Ethanol Worth the Cost?" (emphasis added):

"Ethanol remains more expensive than petroleum-derived gasoline. And that means subsidies: $7 billion in 2010 alone, once tax credits, tariffs and other incentives are added together. In fact, between 1980 and 2000 the U.S. government has devoted some $19 billion in tax breaks alone to the ethanol-from-corn effort, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, and ethanol subsidies per liter of the biofuel have often been larger than the total cost of a liter of gas the biofuel replaced. A significant portion of the profits made by agribusiness giants like Poet or Archer Daniels Midland—which, along with oil company Valero, are responsible for the bulk of ethanol produced in the U.S.—can be attributed to this government largesse with taxpayer dollars.

As the USDA noted in a report on gasohol in 1986: ethanol "cannot be justified on economic grounds" and "had no long-term prospect for survival without massive new government assistance." More recently, the Congressional Research Service noted in a report last October that if the entire all-time record U.S. corn crop of 2009 was used to make ethanol—it would only replace roughly 18 percent of national gasoline use. "Expanding corn-based ethanol to significantly promote U.S. energy security is likely to be infeasible," the researchers wrote."

MP: Given all of the attention and scrutiny that oil companies like ExxonMobil get, where's the equivalent outrage about the windfall/obscene/excessive profits, taxpayer subsidies, and tax breaks for ethanol producers like ADM?"